Obituaries|Mark Medoff, ‘Children of a Lesser God’ Playwright, Is Dead at 79

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Mark Medoff, ‘Children of a Lesser God’ Playwright, Is Dead at 79

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Phyllis Frelich, left, and David Ackroyd in the original Broadway production of “Children of a Lesser God,” by Mark Medoff. The play came about because Ms. Frelich, who was deaf, told Mr. Medoff about the lack of major roles for deaf actors. He decided to write one.CreditCreditPhotofest

Mark Medoff, whose acclaimed play “Children of a Lesser God,” featuring a deaf central character, won the Tony Award for best play in 1980 and was turned into a 1986 movie that won an Oscar for its female lead, Marlee Matlin, died on Tuesday in Las Cruces, N.M. He was 79.

His daughter Jessica Medoff Bunchman posted news of his death on Facebook. The Las Cruces Sun-News said he had cancer.

Mr. Medoff, who taught at New Mexico State University for more than half a century, wrote more than 30 plays.

He was drawing notice well before “Children of a Lesser God,” especially with “When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?,” in which a threatening intruder disrupts life in a sleepy diner. The play was an early production of the influential Circle Repertory Theater in Manhattan and was Mr. Medoff’s first play to be staged in New York City.

“‘Red Ryder’ has vitality and authenticity,” Mel Gussow said in his review in The New York Times in 1973, “and Medoff’s writing is crystalline-sharp. The Circle has discovered a play and a playwright.”

The next year his comedy “The Wager” was produced at the Eastside Playhouse in Manhattan. “Mr. Medoff plays with a plethora of words,” Clive Barnes wrote in a rave review in The Times, “and plays to win.”

But “Children of a Lesser God” brought him a new level of prominence. The play, first staged at New Mexico State and then, in 1979, at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, is about a strong-willed young woman, Sarah, who is deaf, and her evolving relationship with James, a speech teacher at a state school for the deaf who struggles to understand her world and perspective.

If “The Miracle Worker,” William Gibson’s play about Helen Keller and her teacher, had hinted at similar themes in 1959, Mr. Medoff explored them in sometimes funny, sometimes wrenching detail, and he did it with a strong female character who, on Broadway, was played by a deaf actress, Phyllis Frelich. She and her husband, Robert Steinberg, had advised Mr. Medoff as he worked on the play.

The play had come about when Ms. Frelich told Mr. Medoff that there were no substantive roles for deaf actresses, and he vowed to write one.

Ms. Frelich, who died in 2014, won the best-actress Tony, and her co-star, John Rubinstein, won for best actor. “Children of a Lesser God” ran for more than two years.

The film version brought Mr. Medoff and Hesper Anderson an Oscar nomination for their screenplay. Ms. Matlin won the best actress Oscar for her performance as Sarah.

“He insisted and fought the studio that the role be played by a deaf actor,” Ms. Matlin, who lost her hearing at 18 months old, said on Twitter on Wednesday. “I would not be here as an Oscar winner if it weren’t for him.”

Mark Medoff was born on March 18, 1940, in Mount Carmel, Ill. He grew up in Illinois and in Florida, playing basketball at Miami Beach High School.

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Mr. Medoff in New York in 2004. He wrote more than 30 plays.CreditJustin Walters/Associated Press

He earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Miami and a master’s at Stanford. In 1966 he began teaching English at New Mexico State.

“I broke out in sweats before each of my classes every day for the first few months,” Mr. Medoff told the New Mexico State alumni magazine recently, “part excitement that I was responsible for facilitating the education of several hundred students a year, and part terror that one of those 18-year-olds or returning Vietnam vets would realize I was a poseur who really didn’t know much about anything.”

He would later head the theater department at the university. And while teaching, he began writing plays, at first for the Las Cruces Community Theater.

His early success with “Red Ryder” led to a 1979 film version, for which he wrote the screenplay. Among his other screenplays was one for the 1988 film “Clara’s Heart,” which he adapted from a novel by Joseph Olshan. The story involved a chambermaid, played by Whoopi Goldberg, who bonds with a young boy named David. Neil Patrick Harris, just a teenager, played that part, his first screen role.

“Mark saw potential in me when I was 12 years old at a weeklong drama camp in Las Cruces,” Mr. Harris said by email, and Mr. Medoff helped him tape an audition for the film.

After “Children of a Lesser God,” Mr. Medoff wrote several other plays with roles tailored for Ms. Frelich, including “The Hands of Its Enemy,” seen in 1986 at City Center Theater in New York, and “Gila,” staged at the Odyssey Theater in Los Angeles in 1998.

In 2001 Ms. Felich was in the cast of Mr. Medoff’s “Road to a Revolution” at Deaf West Theater; the play is about a fictional family traveling across the country to participate in a protest at Gallaudet University, the Washington school for the deaf and hard of hearing that in 1988 had experienced a real-life controversy over the appointment of a hearing person as president.

Mr. Medoff’s other New York productions included “The Heart Outright,” a sort of sequel to “Red Ryder,” staged at New York’s Theater for the New City in 1989. A 2016 film version of that play had a cast that included Mr. Medoff’s daughter Jessica and Mr. Medoff himself.

In 2004, his play “Prymate” caused a mild stir in part because it featured a black actor, André De Shields, playing a gorilla. A Broadway production closed after just a few performances. In April 2018 a revival of “Children of a Lesser God” opened on Broadway; it ran for 54 performances.

Mr. Medoff, though, had long since become a playwright who did not view New York as the center of the universe. His works were performed regularly at colleges and regional theaters, and if they never received a New York production, he was content with that.

“There are a lot of playwrights who have their own little regional theater networks for developing scripts,” he told The Times in 1988, and his network had a Southwestern orientation, many of his plays starting out at his own university.

“I like to go places where people are interested in my work,” he added. “It’s that simple.”

Mr. Medoff’s first marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Jessica, Mr. Medoff is survived by his wife, Stephanie Thorne, whom he married in 1972; two other daughters, Rachel Harrison and Debra Medoff Marks; and eight grandchildren.

Mr. Medoff would occasionally direct and even more occasionally act. In 2015, he took to the stage for the first time in 25 years as Vladimir in a production of “Waiting for Godot” at the Rio Grande Theater in Las Cruces. His daughter Jessica directed. A granddaughter, Grace Marks, played the role of The Boy (reimagined as The Girl).

“Medoff prowls the stage like a caged animal on edge,” David Salcido wrote in a review in The Sun-News, “anticipatory and spitting out his lines curtly like a man who simply can’t be bothered with distractions.” He was 74 at the time.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Mark Medoff, Playwright Behind ‘Children of a Lesser God,’ Is Dead at 79. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe